Plan things as much as you like - they will turn out differently anyways

International Management Studies in the Baltic Sea Region (BMS), 6. Semester, University of Nicosia (UNIC), Sommersemester 2020

When I first started looking for a university and country where I wanted to spend my semester abroad, I quickly realized that the spots that were considered desirable by most students would probably be heavily overrun, therefore I decided to go for something smaller and less popular. Therefore, I chose Cyprus and the University of Nicosia (UNIC). Little did I know that I would end up with four other students from my university in going there as well – but that already brings me to the overlaying theme of my semester abroad: Even if you plan things to happen in a certain way, they will never, or at least almost never turn out the way you planned. Therefore, at this point, let me already share with you with my key take-away of the semester on which I will elaborate further later in this essay: Take it easy and stay flexible and open-minded at all times.

When I got accepted to UNIC, most of the administrative tasks with both the HOST and the UNIC were relatively easy to handle as there were mostly clear instructions to follow. The challenging task was to find a fitting accommodation. Of course, there was the easy way to just book with the extremely modern on-campus accommodation provided by the university. (They just finished building the same year.) But after some research, I found out that most of the fun Erasmus activities such as meeting new people from all over the world and partying would take place in the city centre. Therefore, I started looking for different accommodation possibilities and found out that the organisation “Erasmus Society Nicosia” offered accommodations all around the city centre. In the end, they turned out to be way below the quality standards that the official housing of UNIC offered, but they were affordable, closer to the city centre and I was going to stay in a house filled with Erasmus students. So that’s why I chose this accommodation and besides an uncomfortable bed the apartments were alright.  

After arriving, we firstly go to experience the university. The course sizes were comparable to the ones I was used to from HOST, but I quickly realized big differences in teaching methods. Lectures take three hours, at HOST however the same amount of input would have easily been put in a one-and-a-half-hour lecture. Professors sometimes would spend most of the first half repeating their last lecture almost word for word and would also sometimes spend huge portions of their class talking about topics which were absolutely irrelevant to the goals of the course. On the one hand you lose a lot of time that way, but on the other hand you
Field report: Erasmus in Cyprus at University of Nicosia (UNIC) 03.02.20-09.06.20 Niklas Schonscheck, 6th semester International Management Studies in the BSR really get to know the professors and also your fellow students better and are sometimes able to listen to a very elaborated practical example instead of rushing through a topic. But before I could decide if I liked this way of teaching or not, the pandemic hit the island. There it was: One of the many but certainly the biggest of all the unforeseeable changes that await one when studying abroad. Especially because in my experience Cypriots are always taking everything easy and don’t seem to be bothered too much, I have to say that I was impressed with how quickly they were able to switch to distance learning. Within less than two weeks we were back on track with online courses and I really appreciated the way UNIC always worked in a transparent manner when planning the alternated exam periods and so on.  

During the pandemic, the whole island was on a standstill and besides the online lectures there was basically nothing worthwhile to do. I had planned to use the Easter holidays to travel, but by then I was forced to spend the first warm days within the apartment instead of on the beach. But this change also had it´s good side: Instead of my first plans to use Cyprus as a “base-camp” and to travel to neighbouring countries, when we were allowed to travel on the island again, we had some time to explore the island. And I didn’t expect the island to be as beautiful as I found it to be. Because of the pandemic, there was no tourists around and we got to experience empty beaches, empty national parcs and a beautiful nature in general. We were told, that all of those places are usually heavily crowded and that we can actually consider ourselves very lucky to experience the island in this way.

All in all, I have to say that my Erasmus was an amazing experience. I met wonderful people from all over the world, got to experience the beautiful Cyprus without its massive tourism and in the end had a very good time despite all the challenges that the pandemic posed. All because I never let the negative impacts influence me but because I tried to stay flexible and open minded in every situation.